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User:Mokurai/How to Bypass Creationists (view source)
Revision as of 22:22, 27 March 2009
, 22:22, 27 March 2009Texas Citizens for Science article
Submitted to [http://www.texscience.org/ Texas Citizens for Science]
For more than a century, the process for acquiring printed textbooks
for schools has given organized pressure groups and textbook
publishers undue influence over textbook writing. Creationism is the
best-known case, but in fact every major social controversy produces
the same phenomenon. Lack of truth in sex education in general, and
AIDS prevention and treatment in particular, are harmful to global
health, not just the health of the students given watered-down
textbooks, and, inevitably, their offspring. But the problem goes much
deeper than that.
As Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman pointed out at length in
Judging Books by Their Covers (widely republished on the Internet, for
example at http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm) textbook quality
in all math and science subjects is terrible. He is by no means the
only one to notice, and it is not only math and science. Ambrose
Bierce took on history books in The Devil's Dictionary in the 1911:
"HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant,
which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly
fools." In 1983, Ronald Reagan's National Commission on Excellence in
Education concluded, in A Nation at Risk
(http://www.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/index.html): “If an unfriendly
foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre
educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed
it as an act of war.”
It is not only active pressure groups, political, religious, social,
and other that have brought us to this pass. The economics of
publishing have long worked against us, when only California, Texas,
and New York had the clout to get books published. Only they could
order in sufficient quantity to get the attention of publishers. Those
who actually know something about the various forms of subject matter
have largely given up the fight until recently, as have most education
reformers. Richard Feynman fought for accuracy in science and math for
years, but gave it up as a bad job under the political and economic
situation he was learning about, and in the absence of useful allies.
But there is a change coming in the economics of publishing, visible
everywhere, due to the Internet and to the movement to Open
Intellectual Property--Free Software, Creative Commons media, Open
Access publishing and more. More and more software and content are
available on the Internet all the time, in more and more languages.
Print newspapers are dying in profusion, while the remaining papers
put better versions of their stories online than in the printed
version. The Huffington Post, which has no print edition, gets
questions at Presidential press conferences. We are not ready to stop
buying books yet, but electronic books are steadily becoming more
popular as the technology gets less expensive and better. A few
authors have put free versions of new novels online at no cost, and
found that this increased print sales. Tens of millions of files are
uploaded to the Internet under Creative Commons licenses. Scientific
journals are moving steadily to electronic editions and to Open
Access. And there is a substantial Free Textbook movement, as can be
seen at http://www.librarianchick.com/. Stacy, the Librarian Chick,
indexes her catalog of free electronic textbooks on the Web from all
available sources in English.
So far, almost all of this online publishing for free download is
fixed content--PDFs, Word documents, pre-recorded music, videos, and
the like. But there are exceptions, such as the source tracks to some
professionally recorded music, released at the same time as the CDs.
Mix your own version, or turn off one track and play Music Minus One
style with the rest of the band. Another sort of exception is
Mathematica and Matlab notebooks. Anybody who has the software can
find hundreds, even thousands of interactive lessons, along with
simulations and much more, that users are encouraged to improve on.
This free content is essential to marketing these commercial software
packages. In addition to the commercial market and the Creative
Commons movement, there is a growing use of Free Software in
education, from the course management system, Moodle, to the Sugar
software on the One Laptop Per Child XO. Here the stated purpose is to
educate a billion children to be able to get jobs and start
businesses, and thereby end poverty. More than a million units are in
use, and millions more of this and other Linux laptop and tablet
computers are on order, in some cases for every child in entire
countries.
Most people know a little bit about Smalltalk, the software from Xerox
Palo Alto Research Center that inspired the Macintosh GUI, and spread
from there to Windows, X11 on Unix, the Atari ST, the Commodore Amiga,
and the rest. It is not so well known that this transformation of all
computing was a side effect of its original design goal: to write
software suitable for children from the beginning to the end of their
schooling, and to set out the requirements of the computers to run it,
the Dynabooks. According to Alan Kay, the head of the Smalltalk
project, we have very nearly arrived in the Dynabook age with the OLPC
XO, particularly since it runs the Etoys version of Smalltalk.
The XO doesn't have as much storage as he would like, and it's a bit
slow. Many of the village schools where it should be deployed don't
have electricity or Internet connections. But we know that the
inevitable working of Moore's Law will give us the speed and space we
need, and we already have renewable power systems and broadband
Internet at low enough costs for many countries to install themselves,
given the motivation and the political will. The cost to do the same
in the poorest countries once and for all is something like $10
billion for WiMax internet, and somewhat more for electricity. Not
peanuts, but well within the scope of current foreign aid.
With Smalltalk and the Sugar software written in Python that goes with
it, we have a solid base of software that will go out to every child
in the OLPC program and to any others who get Sugar on other
computers. We can integrate this software into a new generation of
Digital Texbooks, and over time into the curriculum. Sugar Labs has
worked with several Linux distributions to package Sugar for simple
installation, including some that run on computers adopted by various
school systems, such as Venezuela (Caixa Magica Linux).
For decades now, Computer Literacy has been an educational failure.
Not totally useless, but look at it this way. Would we believe in a
literacy program that provided one room with paper and pencils for
students to use for an hour a week each? Where there were no printed
textbooks, and students could not do written homework? Only if we were
ourselves illiterate.
Earth Treasury has organized a group of partners to design and write
textbooks on this basis, on every subject in the standard curricula,
and a few others that will be needed in various countries.
(http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Creating_textbooks) Among its partners
are Creative Commons; Alan Kay's Viewpoints Research Institute; The
Doug Engelbart Institute, dedicated to enhancing collective
intelligence; Groklaw, an authority on legal issues surrounding Open
IP; FLOSS Manuals, which has created a Book Sprint methodology for
turning out books in three days; and The Tech Museum of Innovation in
San Jose, California, which would like to have a room with 50 XOs set
up, and invite school classes to try them out. In one way, offering
just a tip-of-the-tongue taste is worse than Computer Literacy, but
the point is to interest students, teachers, parents, school
administrations, and politicians in installing the full program.
So what happens when we get at least one set of textbooks for every
common subject in at least every grade from first through sixth? They
are free of cost, so the usual bureaucratic textbook acquisition
process and the usual political standards-setting process don't apply.
Free texbooks plus inexpensive computers cost less than printed
textbooks, an easy selling point once we get there. They are also free
to improve, like Wikipedia, for teachers, students, scientists, and
anybody else. Teachers will be able to pick the materials that suit
their understanding and that of their students, and their own
educational purposes. Parents and students will be able to choose
materials to their liking, as well. At this point, schools will be
able to try new educational approaches that could not possibly get
official approval for spending money. It is not the case everywhere,
but in many schools anything that improves student test scores without
costing money or raising public controversy is permitted for teachers
to do.
Among the innovations that software and computer hardware enable will
be students doing far more significant observational and experimental
work from a much earlier age. They will have the built-in camera and
microphone for recording data, plus a digital oscilloscope program
that graphs waveforms from the sound port, or shows the frequency
analysis. They will also have powerful simulation software, and
powerful data analysis and visualization software. Alan Kay likes to
describe how we can teach Galilean gravity in two days to
10-year-olds.
Day one:Program a simulation of constant acceleration in Turtle Art or
Etoys, with a starting speed of 5, and an increment of 10, plotting a
dot for the end of each motion. Note the pattern of distances.
5 15 25 35 45 55...
Divide by 5
1 3 5 7 9 11 Aha! successive odd numbers
Take sums from the beginning to each number
1=1
1+3=4
1+3+5=9
16
25
36
Aha! again. Successive squares.
Day two: Have the children go outside with their XOs, and have someone
drop a brightly-colored ball from the school roof while the children
take videos. Show them how to overlay successive frames of the video
so that the school is in the same place, while the ball moves. Turn
this picture sideways, and ask whether the children recognize the
pattern of dots, which is (Aha!) the same as what they did the day
before. Now you can discuss constant acceleration, linear velocity,
and quadratic position (d=0.5× x^2) on the basis of actual experience.
You can also talk about how Galileo worked all this out without a
camera, simulation software, or even an accurate clock.
Very good. Now we need no more than 10,000 such topic lessons
altogether. We have to cover at least a dozen subjects for every year
of school. So we are getting subject-matter experts, teachers,
education researchers, software developers, editors, artists, and
others together on this. Our first project is fourth-grade math,
following the Massachusetts curriculum standards.
(http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/fourthgrademath) Texans are
welcome to join the work on the mailing list, and to remix a version
to their state standard. Work on evolution, sex education, civics
(particularly how to combat corruption and pressure groups) and other
topics not currently well served should be a priority.
This textbook project is only the beginning. It is the fact that
students will not be restricted to one official textbook on any
subject that will have the greatest effect. Children will be able to
test the authority of the books for themselves by comparing
alternative textbooks, or looking at the explanations, and even the
primary sources, on the Internet. Some books will survive the test,
and some will not. We can use a Wiki structure with a page for each
lesson, and invite public discussion of the correct way to state the
information, and the best ways to teach it. We can use the Continuous
Improvement methodology, now that printing cost and the purchasing
process do not stand in our way.
However this may turn out in the US, there is no question that it will
have a transforming effect on education systems inherited from
Imperial powers around the world. Such systems were designed to keep
the population in line, and prevent interference in Imperial war and
pillage. They are not worthy of free peoples, but it would have cost
too much to reinvent them the old way. Now, between free publication,
public authorship and editing, and the ability to converse with each
other nationwide, even worldwide, these peoples no longer have any
reason to keep their fetters.
==
Edward Cherlin first discovered textbooks that failed to teach their
subjects properly in first grade. In third grade, he discovered that
teachers and textbooks recited as facts some things that simply were
not so. He is the Founder of Earth Treasury, which aims to end poverty
worldwide by assisting in providing quality education at minimum cost
to the world's billion children. A large part of the program consists
of redesigning textbooks for the Digital Age, and getting people
together to create them and constantly improve them. He is one of the
authors of the FLOSS Manuals books, How to Bypass Internet Censorship,
Firefox 3.0, and Introduction to the Linux Command Line. Most
recently, he has been organizing textbook projects in Math and Civics,
and forming alliances for village electricity, Internet, and
microfinance.
For more than a century, the process for acquiring printed textbooks
for schools has given organized pressure groups and textbook
publishers undue influence over textbook writing. Creationism is the
best-known case, but in fact every major social controversy produces
the same phenomenon. Lack of truth in sex education in general, and
AIDS prevention and treatment in particular, are harmful to global
health, not just the health of the students given watered-down
textbooks, and, inevitably, their offspring. But the problem goes much
deeper than that.
As Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman pointed out at length in
Judging Books by Their Covers (widely republished on the Internet, for
example at http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm) textbook quality
in all math and science subjects is terrible. He is by no means the
only one to notice, and it is not only math and science. Ambrose
Bierce took on history books in The Devil's Dictionary in the 1911:
"HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant,
which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly
fools." In 1983, Ronald Reagan's National Commission on Excellence in
Education concluded, in A Nation at Risk
(http://www.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/index.html): “If an unfriendly
foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre
educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed
it as an act of war.”
It is not only active pressure groups, political, religious, social,
and other that have brought us to this pass. The economics of
publishing have long worked against us, when only California, Texas,
and New York had the clout to get books published. Only they could
order in sufficient quantity to get the attention of publishers. Those
who actually know something about the various forms of subject matter
have largely given up the fight until recently, as have most education
reformers. Richard Feynman fought for accuracy in science and math for
years, but gave it up as a bad job under the political and economic
situation he was learning about, and in the absence of useful allies.
But there is a change coming in the economics of publishing, visible
everywhere, due to the Internet and to the movement to Open
Intellectual Property--Free Software, Creative Commons media, Open
Access publishing and more. More and more software and content are
available on the Internet all the time, in more and more languages.
Print newspapers are dying in profusion, while the remaining papers
put better versions of their stories online than in the printed
version. The Huffington Post, which has no print edition, gets
questions at Presidential press conferences. We are not ready to stop
buying books yet, but electronic books are steadily becoming more
popular as the technology gets less expensive and better. A few
authors have put free versions of new novels online at no cost, and
found that this increased print sales. Tens of millions of files are
uploaded to the Internet under Creative Commons licenses. Scientific
journals are moving steadily to electronic editions and to Open
Access. And there is a substantial Free Textbook movement, as can be
seen at http://www.librarianchick.com/. Stacy, the Librarian Chick,
indexes her catalog of free electronic textbooks on the Web from all
available sources in English.
So far, almost all of this online publishing for free download is
fixed content--PDFs, Word documents, pre-recorded music, videos, and
the like. But there are exceptions, such as the source tracks to some
professionally recorded music, released at the same time as the CDs.
Mix your own version, or turn off one track and play Music Minus One
style with the rest of the band. Another sort of exception is
Mathematica and Matlab notebooks. Anybody who has the software can
find hundreds, even thousands of interactive lessons, along with
simulations and much more, that users are encouraged to improve on.
This free content is essential to marketing these commercial software
packages. In addition to the commercial market and the Creative
Commons movement, there is a growing use of Free Software in
education, from the course management system, Moodle, to the Sugar
software on the One Laptop Per Child XO. Here the stated purpose is to
educate a billion children to be able to get jobs and start
businesses, and thereby end poverty. More than a million units are in
use, and millions more of this and other Linux laptop and tablet
computers are on order, in some cases for every child in entire
countries.
Most people know a little bit about Smalltalk, the software from Xerox
Palo Alto Research Center that inspired the Macintosh GUI, and spread
from there to Windows, X11 on Unix, the Atari ST, the Commodore Amiga,
and the rest. It is not so well known that this transformation of all
computing was a side effect of its original design goal: to write
software suitable for children from the beginning to the end of their
schooling, and to set out the requirements of the computers to run it,
the Dynabooks. According to Alan Kay, the head of the Smalltalk
project, we have very nearly arrived in the Dynabook age with the OLPC
XO, particularly since it runs the Etoys version of Smalltalk.
The XO doesn't have as much storage as he would like, and it's a bit
slow. Many of the village schools where it should be deployed don't
have electricity or Internet connections. But we know that the
inevitable working of Moore's Law will give us the speed and space we
need, and we already have renewable power systems and broadband
Internet at low enough costs for many countries to install themselves,
given the motivation and the political will. The cost to do the same
in the poorest countries once and for all is something like $10
billion for WiMax internet, and somewhat more for electricity. Not
peanuts, but well within the scope of current foreign aid.
With Smalltalk and the Sugar software written in Python that goes with
it, we have a solid base of software that will go out to every child
in the OLPC program and to any others who get Sugar on other
computers. We can integrate this software into a new generation of
Digital Texbooks, and over time into the curriculum. Sugar Labs has
worked with several Linux distributions to package Sugar for simple
installation, including some that run on computers adopted by various
school systems, such as Venezuela (Caixa Magica Linux).
For decades now, Computer Literacy has been an educational failure.
Not totally useless, but look at it this way. Would we believe in a
literacy program that provided one room with paper and pencils for
students to use for an hour a week each? Where there were no printed
textbooks, and students could not do written homework? Only if we were
ourselves illiterate.
Earth Treasury has organized a group of partners to design and write
textbooks on this basis, on every subject in the standard curricula,
and a few others that will be needed in various countries.
(http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Creating_textbooks) Among its partners
are Creative Commons; Alan Kay's Viewpoints Research Institute; The
Doug Engelbart Institute, dedicated to enhancing collective
intelligence; Groklaw, an authority on legal issues surrounding Open
IP; FLOSS Manuals, which has created a Book Sprint methodology for
turning out books in three days; and The Tech Museum of Innovation in
San Jose, California, which would like to have a room with 50 XOs set
up, and invite school classes to try them out. In one way, offering
just a tip-of-the-tongue taste is worse than Computer Literacy, but
the point is to interest students, teachers, parents, school
administrations, and politicians in installing the full program.
So what happens when we get at least one set of textbooks for every
common subject in at least every grade from first through sixth? They
are free of cost, so the usual bureaucratic textbook acquisition
process and the usual political standards-setting process don't apply.
Free texbooks plus inexpensive computers cost less than printed
textbooks, an easy selling point once we get there. They are also free
to improve, like Wikipedia, for teachers, students, scientists, and
anybody else. Teachers will be able to pick the materials that suit
their understanding and that of their students, and their own
educational purposes. Parents and students will be able to choose
materials to their liking, as well. At this point, schools will be
able to try new educational approaches that could not possibly get
official approval for spending money. It is not the case everywhere,
but in many schools anything that improves student test scores without
costing money or raising public controversy is permitted for teachers
to do.
Among the innovations that software and computer hardware enable will
be students doing far more significant observational and experimental
work from a much earlier age. They will have the built-in camera and
microphone for recording data, plus a digital oscilloscope program
that graphs waveforms from the sound port, or shows the frequency
analysis. They will also have powerful simulation software, and
powerful data analysis and visualization software. Alan Kay likes to
describe how we can teach Galilean gravity in two days to
10-year-olds.
Day one:Program a simulation of constant acceleration in Turtle Art or
Etoys, with a starting speed of 5, and an increment of 10, plotting a
dot for the end of each motion. Note the pattern of distances.
5 15 25 35 45 55...
Divide by 5
1 3 5 7 9 11 Aha! successive odd numbers
Take sums from the beginning to each number
1=1
1+3=4
1+3+5=9
16
25
36
Aha! again. Successive squares.
Day two: Have the children go outside with their XOs, and have someone
drop a brightly-colored ball from the school roof while the children
take videos. Show them how to overlay successive frames of the video
so that the school is in the same place, while the ball moves. Turn
this picture sideways, and ask whether the children recognize the
pattern of dots, which is (Aha!) the same as what they did the day
before. Now you can discuss constant acceleration, linear velocity,
and quadratic position (d=0.5× x^2) on the basis of actual experience.
You can also talk about how Galileo worked all this out without a
camera, simulation software, or even an accurate clock.
Very good. Now we need no more than 10,000 such topic lessons
altogether. We have to cover at least a dozen subjects for every year
of school. So we are getting subject-matter experts, teachers,
education researchers, software developers, editors, artists, and
others together on this. Our first project is fourth-grade math,
following the Massachusetts curriculum standards.
(http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/fourthgrademath) Texans are
welcome to join the work on the mailing list, and to remix a version
to their state standard. Work on evolution, sex education, civics
(particularly how to combat corruption and pressure groups) and other
topics not currently well served should be a priority.
This textbook project is only the beginning. It is the fact that
students will not be restricted to one official textbook on any
subject that will have the greatest effect. Children will be able to
test the authority of the books for themselves by comparing
alternative textbooks, or looking at the explanations, and even the
primary sources, on the Internet. Some books will survive the test,
and some will not. We can use a Wiki structure with a page for each
lesson, and invite public discussion of the correct way to state the
information, and the best ways to teach it. We can use the Continuous
Improvement methodology, now that printing cost and the purchasing
process do not stand in our way.
However this may turn out in the US, there is no question that it will
have a transforming effect on education systems inherited from
Imperial powers around the world. Such systems were designed to keep
the population in line, and prevent interference in Imperial war and
pillage. They are not worthy of free peoples, but it would have cost
too much to reinvent them the old way. Now, between free publication,
public authorship and editing, and the ability to converse with each
other nationwide, even worldwide, these peoples no longer have any
reason to keep their fetters.
==
Edward Cherlin first discovered textbooks that failed to teach their
subjects properly in first grade. In third grade, he discovered that
teachers and textbooks recited as facts some things that simply were
not so. He is the Founder of Earth Treasury, which aims to end poverty
worldwide by assisting in providing quality education at minimum cost
to the world's billion children. A large part of the program consists
of redesigning textbooks for the Digital Age, and getting people
together to create them and constantly improve them. He is one of the
authors of the FLOSS Manuals books, How to Bypass Internet Censorship,
Firefox 3.0, and Introduction to the Linux Command Line. Most
recently, he has been organizing textbook projects in Math and Civics,
and forming alliances for village electricity, Internet, and
microfinance.